School Dinners
by dblauvelt
Summary: A warhead is headed to Earth Turlough's been abducted from the battlelines of Vietnam, the Doctor's out of his depth and Tegan's, well... not overly thrilled.
1. Default Chapter

The impact blew Turlough sideways. His head head bouncing off the trunk of a tree with a slight 'bong.' Then he was flat on his bum staring stupidly at the people dying around him.

He had heard the sound of the ?_mortar_? before it hit, but he was too busy panicking to care.

Thirty-four meals... that's how he was counting now. Days and night ceased to have any meaning since he never really slept. Counting meals was the only thing that kept him going. Thirty-four meals since he had last sat in the TARDIS and dined. It wasn't the Doctor he missed, really. It was the food machine. It was an absolutely wonderful creation that provided him with meals of his home planet. After nine years of school dinners, there was no more wonderful thing in the world.

But right now, there were no dinners in sight and Turlough was getting shot at and slathered in mud. Why the Doctor had left him stranded in the war zone was beyond him.

Turlough picked himself up again and started running away from the sound of gun fire, his body quivering with energy, his thoughts a blur as he ran as fast as he possibly could, kicking his brain into survival mode, multi-tasking to figure out how to get the hell out of here.

He hadn't multi-tasked since he was a kid. Not that there was any need over the past ten years. Maintaining three separate trains of thought at an English Public School was hardly required. It would have driven him insane. Whenever he had tried it during lectures to distract himself from the hideous hours of boredom, he ended up thinking were three separate mind-sets all filled with frustration and hate, each layer mentally stacked one over another, bile dripping between his synapses.

His Overseer/psychologist/jailer -they had to act as counselors to their charges/prisoners to make sure that they did not go insane- had suggested that this multi-tasking merely made the other students at his school think he was even more devious and duplicitous than he really was. The Overseer had suggested that Turlough might try and fit in at school: rugby, the debate team, or perhaps learn to play cricket?

Little Vislor Turlough had merely sat there and listened, while quietly multi-tasking three separate and, yes, devious, ways of having his Overseer executed when Turlough returned to power on Trion.

The slap of gunfire jarred Turlough's eardrum and a splinter of flying wood stabbed him in the eye, his lachrymal gland spurting saline as he flinched sideways, pushing off the tree, pressing his hand against his eye, the sound of bullets- he found himself slipping into what the Trions referred to as Swahalla, four seperate, simultaneous trains of thoughts.

Something dropped onto the ground next to him.

_odd, it's pulsing_

_six centimeters long, two centimeters in diameter_

_radiating at approximately 0.32352 in the visible range of the EM spectrum fluctuating at a rate of two pulses per second_

_force bomb_

_This is your mission if you choose to accept it. This message_

_But force tanta bombs are Riftan V technology, while bullets and mortars? Surely indicative of a level IV society..._

Turlough turned his head slightly as he ran, throwing his hands up in front of his face risking a blow from random branches, and saw by a flare of light-

-he could actually see the resulting force wave smash aside vegetation as it swam through the jungle to meet him. He tried to throw himself down onto the forest floor, but the shockwave hit him first, slamming him sideways, his body skittering through the vegetation like a rock across of a pond.

_Force bomb, got it right _

_What the hell is a force bomb doing in Vietnam? vegetation cushion, _

_Impact in two, one _

_They're all dead_

_We're all dead_

_I'm all dead_

_Zero _

Turlough jumped- and landed in a foxhole.

There was no dirt, no mud, no slime, no guns, no death, no explosion

Turlough noticed people standing around him, staring as he lay on the humming floor, the thick mud that encased his body made wet, slurping noises as he pulled himself up.

He heard the muttering behind him as the doors-

_Outer hull/cold plasma/ real world interface_

-slid shut. He gazed around at the

_resonance indicative of a power source, frequency and wavelength comparable and to_

_-_the room? It was vast, immense and huge - no walls, just ?_walls_? of nothing that he could see through, he could see the forest he just left and the Viet Cong? or was it the Americans? He could never tell humans apart, they all looked alike, shouting and shooting down the foxhole he had just fallen down and if he tilted his head he could see what looked like an embassy office and if he tilted again he could see a primitive space capsule- were they still using those absurd rockets- bobbing up and down in the ocean while a Navy helicopter were raising an astro?cosmo?naut, and if he turned his head again he could see a Broadway musical? and so and so and so...

_Outer plasmic hull must be simultaneously linked to six separate geographic points while resting in... one... chronological point? _

He stopped and looked at the troopers again clustered around a mushroom shaped control console. Turlough slumped into a nearby Louis XIV lounge chair. There were at least six similar consoles that sprouted from the floor around the room, although, oddly none possessed the familiar crystalline glowing mass that had pulsed and oscillated on the console of the Doctor's

_A TARDIS: Observation Model?_

Turlough crawled away from 'his' door as the familiar takeoff noises began. He imagined the scene of a disappearing pot plant, a mirror, a cobweb, a tree trunk, and a toilet.

Turlough grabbed at the control console as the floor lurched under him- no the walls were moving up and down- no, they were moving up and down and the walls were staying still.

Turlough had a mental flash of the Doctor's control console, the central crystal column gently gliding up and down, moving in concert and monitoring the vast power source beneath it...

Turlough closed his eyes, opened them and stared at the patch of white floor that lay beneath his feet.

He gulped.


	2. Oh No It Isn't

"A quick pop back to see the Coronation, you said." Tegan could feel the changes rushing through her already, but still she spoke, venting her frustration, desperate to maintain her sense of self.

"Boating in the Caribbean with cosmos and back on Monday for work, you said." And she'd believed him this time.

She couldn't see the Doctor any more, so intense was her pain; her vision was filled with throbbing lights and blinding white streaks that sliced into her mind. She knew he was there though, still bound and cuffed in the rear of the lab, watching helplessly as they changed her, customized her. The alien technology screamed around her as her skin began to bubble, swell and change.

Landing in the middle of the Vietnam war instead of Buckingham Palace was not, it had to be said, a complete surprise to Tegan given the Doctor's past record. At first, it had made her laugh, the giddy emotion laced with nostalgia that clung to the back of her throat, cloying, bitter. The laughter had ended quickly as napalm and death erupted around them, separating them from the TARDIS, the jungle dripping with fiery, liquid death. They'd lost Turlough first, before the aliens, before all this.

Amid all the pain, all the tearing and the seizures that racked her body, something tickled at the base of her neck.

"You can't do this to me! STOP IT!"

She hadn't understood the name of the aliens that held them, that had dragged them back to their ship deep in the jungle. There had been too many explosions, bugs and horror. Even in the still of the laboratory in the bowels of the vessel, she'd only had a chance to hear a whisper: 'Her DNA has been contaminated; candidate suitable for extraction."

Then the pain had begun.

Now the tickle sensation was growing and she felt it unravel and burst. It blossomed in the back of her mind, uncurling, looping outward in great logarithmic furls, consuming her mind, devouring her body.

"Think of home," was all the Doctor had managed to say to her before she was pulled from him and chucked into the hulking machine that embraced her with organic tendrils of green and purple.

Everything was distant now... the pain was receeding, she tried to dig mental fingernails into the ether around her, but she felt herself slipping away, dispersing, washed away in the white light. She made one last desperate cry in a silent, ragged mental voice:

home

The thought echoed in her head, but her mind was no longer her own.

The Doctor stared up at his companion, helpless as her limbs bled and merged in a frothy mess of flesh and blood that wove and seeped into a new form, a larger form, one with no legs, no arms, no sign of humanity. As he watched, horrified, Tegan's shoulders and head merged into a giant, scaly hood that shimmered, the green skin shimmering it a baptism of its own blood. The Mara smashed its way clear of the machinery and towered above them all.

The Doctor realized that he was slipping into shock. Distantly, amid the chaos, he heard the aliens speak calmly to each other, as if observing a tennis match. "Manifestation nearly completed; allow time for acclimation. Provide suitable sustenance. There is very little time until the Myrmidon arrives. If this creature can't defeat it, this world is doomed."


	3. Bad Hair Days

Nyssa was having a bad hair day.

She was not, as Tegan used to say, the sort of person who fussed about such trivial things, but lately Terminus had spiraled so far out of control the little things were the only things that Nyssa still maintained some measure of control over. They were the only things that helped her through the days.

Terminus had once been an empty, desolate and superbly massive wreck floating in the center of the universal expanse. When she'd first arrived, its walkways and irradiation centers were only occasionally filled with lepers and hopped-up guards.

But that was then...

Due much in part to Nyssa's research, the place was now thriving. Too much, in fact.

Not only had her initial progress on Lazar's disease instigated huge advancements, but her follow-on work with other diseases had put Terminus on the map and in demand. The docks had to be retro-fitted in order to accommodate the increased traffic and the many vacant wards, rest areas and food pavilions had been hastily refurnished. The increased population put new demands on the station's infrastructure and in a matter of years the station had hastily ballooned into a large city, filled with residents, workers and support staff.

And, at some point that Nyssa had lost track of on one of her expeditions, the Sisters of Perpetual Affection had installed a brothel.

Which, really, Nyssa didn't have an opinion on, per se, but it was becoming more and more difficult for her staff to maintain regular hours, as their visits to the Sister's decks became more frequent and prolonged.

She sighed as she stepped into her main laboratory and noted that two more employees had failed to arrive on schedule. She decided she'd have to hold their wages as an adcentive.

She sat at her console and peered over schedules and data tables of hours, personnel staffing and research objectives and wondered at what point she'd managed to stop actively doing research and become little more than a program manager.

And, to top it off, the Garm was menstruating again.

Nyssa agitatedly pulled at her curled locks, pondering how to deal with the massive, moody hound. She was just beginning to wind her hair up behind her head when she the first clang echoed through the station. Data tablets and instruments fluttered across the table as the tremor subsided. She grabbed at her personal data pods and began downloading the emergency backups into them as a precaution in case the hull of the station had ruptured, her hair forgotten.

A high-pitched whine stabbed into her brain and sent Nyssa reeling into the table. For a moment she thought there had been an explosion or perhaps some sort of sonic weapon until she recognized it as the emergency fire siren. The whine did not cease nor increase in volume, which not only made it very difficult to sleep through, or, as now, maintain any sort of coherent thought, it also meant that she could hear little else.

Which was why, perhaps, she found herself staring dumbly at the figure before her, staring in wonder at the wall that had apparently been shredded silently, lying in shriveled slices on the floor at its feet.

A guard appeared in the wreckage, firing uselessly at the figure, the rounds bouncing uselessly off its back. The figure raised a casual hand and spat a stream of fluid metal from its wrist that enveloped the guard, leaving him twisting and writing on the ground as the silver snakes devoured him.

Nyssa watched in fascination as the figure placed a hand on what was left of the wall and absorbed it, sucking the splintered metal seamlessly into itself in a moment. It then raised its head then and stared back at her.

The world slipped for a moment.

Its scalp was shaved, dusted with ashen stubble between jagged scars of white and puckered pink, the shoulders were angular and jagged as if the massive limbs had been stapled on. The chest and waist were in cased in a twisting mass of the fluid metal that looped round and round the figure, scurrying up its neck and down the legs. But it was the eyes that dropped Nyssa.

She knew him.

Nyssa found herself sitting on her bum, staring back at the figure, staring at the impossible. Behind him the fallen guard rose to his feet to stand motionless and obedient beside the figure, the silver snakes shifting luridly under his skin and uniform.

"Nyssa." The figure boomed. Even his voice had changed, replaced by something deep, reverberating and hideous.

But, nonetheless, the figure before her was unmistakably Adric.


	4. Plus one Minus One

"TARDIS... Turlough... Tegan... Three T's... Must remember... Mustn't forget... I recognized their technology, of course." The Doctor stumbled through the jungle, chatting amiably to the stalk of celery on his lapel, his head still ringing from the encounter with the Mara. "I'm afraid their species name escapes me, you see they're terribly old. Inhabitants of one of the Home System worlds... Legend has it they used to set up defenses on worlds that were not ready to fend off temporal threats... Vigilantes of a sort. They were far ahead of Gallifreyan time technology, at the time, so to speak." He tugged at the bright pink band that encircled his wrist as he walked, absently swatting aside leaves and mosquitoes, slowly coming out of his daze, eliminating the anesthesia from his system.

The vegetation around him had blackened. Rain and moisture soaking into the charcoal and chemical residue that once been crowded with leaves and home to a billion creatures. In the smudged distance, he caught sight of familiar blue speck. The incessant sounds of birds and insects faded away as he stumbled toward the center of the destruction, picking his way through the twisted stumps and spines of the exterminated trees. "Yes, well, good question, Joanne. They were, ah, well, all destroyed... Omega blew up their sun to create the Eye of Harmony... Typical Time lord arrogance of course... Microsoft likes to thing they started the policy, but..."

He stood before the TARDIS and paused to gnaw at the pink band with his teeth. He was uncertain of its exact technological function, which bothered him slightly, but even more so, the thing did not go at all with his outfit.

The band was the only trace of the event, the only piece of evidence that the aliens had ever been there. Their ship had vanished. They had released the Mara into the jungle and then dumped him, still partially tranquilized, in the jungle where they'd found him. Apparently, they didn't consider him worth bothering about. Neither had the Mara; it had ignored him completely.

The Doctor felt vaguely insulted by that.

The subtle click made him look up from the bracelet.

"Ah... hello." The rifle was pointed directly at his head. The boy holding it was clearly Vietnamese, his clothes smeared with soot, his face streaked with tears. Blood seeped down his left leg from some unseen wound. "How do you-" The Doctor began heartily, but paused. Instead he raised his hands slowly. "I'm the Doctor."

The little boy's eyes widened in surprise as he comprehended the Doctor's words, but instead of lowering the wound, he held the weapon closer, tightening his finger on the trigger. Confused.

"Ahh..." The Doctor tried to appear as nonthreatening as possible; clearly the presence of the TARDIS, the napalm attack and a dandily dressed fluent foreigner was a bit much. He needed to appear as friendly and charming as possible. "Probably wondering who I've been babbling to this whole time, very understandable, clever chap like you, if I may introduce you to," the Doctor waved a hand to his lapel, "this is Joanne, you see..."

At the movement, the boy fired.

The bullet bounced off of the TARDIS.

The other TARDIS.

The Doctor blinked.

The boy dropped the gun and fled into the forest.

The scarred landscape was filled with TARDISes that had appeared instantaneously out of no where, filling the ruined jungle, centimeters apart from each other. A wall of blue. Dozens. Hundreds. Thousands. A valley of blue police boxes.

Even the humidity level had dropped, so drastically had the time ships altered the landscape. There was no breeze, no birds.

"This can't possibly be good..." The Doctor muttered. He stuffed his hands in his trousers and spun about on his heels, taking in the thousands of identical TARDISes.

Then, as one, with one gargantuan creak, the doors of every police box opened.

A thousand different Doctors stepped out.

A handful he recognized. A thousand more he didn't.

As one they opened their mouths, their lips crying out silently for help.

And, as one, they fell to the charred ground as a million silver snakes burst from their skin with a sickening popping noise and began to devour them.

After the silver worms finished their feast, the corpses stood once more on their feet and turned to the Doctor, the mouths of the snakes snapping hungrily for him.

But he had already gone, and there was a thousand TARDISes minus one in the rugged valley.


	5. Tea with Gods

Turlough was having difficulty believing what he was seeing.

The large yellow happy face bobbing up and down in the air next to him wasn't helping either.

It kept trying to though.

It had already given him a lounge chair and a manicure.

"I can't believe what I'm seeing." Turlough stared at the multitude of views arrayed before him.

"Belief is overrated." God said kindly and offered him tea and biscuits that were floating before Turlough on some invisible force fields.

Turlough took a vanilla wafer and munched quietly. The Timelords had ignored him ever since he'd arrived. One had helped get cleaned up, but they were too busy to do much else about him. They were frantically setting controls on the consoles and running in and out of the doors that seemed to be in six different planets and six different time zones at once. Turlough was getting dizzy. It didn't help that the only time they'd spoken to him, they'd referred to him as Theta Sigma Accessory Number 1,487.

It made Turlough feel like a bit like a handbag.

So he'd joined God who was watching one of the main scanner screens.

It was a little surreal. Trion had heard of the Worldsphere, of course, but only in legend. To the Trions, the People and the Also People, and well, even God was, well, a bit mythical.

Which was silly, really.

The tea was bitter, yet orangey in a way that Turlough found oddly distracting. He didn't take his eyes off the main screen, though. A massive fleet of ships were clustered around the planet below, in a defensive posture. So large were the ships, so many, so much mass… Turlough could barely take it in. He felt as if he were atop a battlement, watching the troops cluster before the castle walls before a final assault.

"But that's Gallifrey!" Turlough exclaimed recognizing the world below them at last.

God frowned, the thick black line of its mouth tugging down at the corners as if drawn by a thick black marker. "Yes, well." It appeared to be considering, as if the question were particularly complex. "Yes, it is."

"But those other ships," Turlough sputtered at the screen, waving his crumbling wafer. "They're defending it!"

God said nothing, but nodded.

There were ships of every shape and size. Some Turlough recognized as Gallifreyan, some were TARDISes, others were battleships the size of moons. There were designs from all reaches of space; Silurian, Hoothi, Yerek, Draconian,…everywhere they flanked the planet, their weapons aimed into deep space, at the darkness that flowed toward them like a tidal wave.

But what blew Turlough's mind, made him stare in bewilderment at his cup of tea, searching for traces of a hallucinogen, were the other ships, interspersed among the ships.

The Dalek ships.

Defending Gallifrey.

The blackness swept toward them, impossibly fast.

Turlough dropped his cup of tea, but never heard it fall.


	6. Mara Gets Her Groove On

This was absolutely delicious.

The Mara slithered through the jungle, gobbling up animals and people alike. To her they were no different. She had to feed.

The fear pumping throughout each and every one of them thrilled her and she drank and drank and drank. In her wake she left only muck, blood and death. Even the plants trembled before her as she thrashed towards the mountains, whipping across valleys and rivers alike in her haste.

Before her, the fear grew, spreading outward like a wave. And so she grew with it, feasting on the raw power of their mortal terror. Until she, the Mara, were a mountain, arcing across Earth, given lift by the fear and hatred and horror.

It was joyous.

After so, long, to fly again. To kill, to taste again.

She dove into the oceans and fed. And again into the sky. And down into the cities, smashing through the skyscrapers and crust. She savored every atom.

And then she was airborne again, her hide slick and glossy against the blackness of space, swirling around the planet that now seemed so tiny, its wounds bleeding into the atmosphere with crimson dust and steam.

And blood.

The Mara roared with delight.

And she then plunged back into the world, smashing through the mantle and into the core, reveling and splashing in the molten, dying heart.

The Doctor watched speechless. On the scanner screen, Earth quivered as the Mara pulled itself wholly into the planet, just as a worm pulls itself into a diseased and rotten apple.

This was impossible. It was 1972.

This couldn't be happening.

They couldn't be dead.

She couldn't be dead. Not like that.

The Doctor sighed, and turned from the screen. He hung his jacket up on the coat rack. He patted his celery kindly before moving back to the console.

The vast gray room was empty. No Tegan. No Turlough. No one.

The room seemed terribly sad, somehow, humming emptily into the nothingness.

He was dead. All of him were dead. Dead or changed.

The pink band itched again, distantly. He fought the urge to rip it off.

It was, quite possibly, the only reason he was still alive, unlike the rest of himselves.

He promised himself he'd never do this, but there was nothing, no one left. Not even himself.

The Doctor squared his shoulders and moved to a particular part of the console. He moved his hands in a strange gesture, fast and quick, in the air above the panel.

A lever appeared where there had been none before.

It was absurdly large, with a round, gleaming knob.

He stared at it, long and deliberating. Then, with both hands, he slowly lowered the lever and stepped away from the console.

The Time Rotor, the neon, crystalline heart of the console, floated upwards until it hovered just above his head. One of the hexagonal panels of the console sank into the floor, leaving the gaping white emptiness in the middle.

The light in the room dimmed, solemnly.

The Doctor closed his eyes and stepped into the center of the console.

He felt panic swell inside him as the console closed around him, but then he felt something sooth him, a quick, gentle brush of calm upon his mind.

And then he was gone.

Behind him, in the empty console room, a little red light began to flash incessantly.


	7. Between Worlds

There were pools everywhere in the forest.

But there were no stars in the sky.

And the pools held no water.

There were no animals. No sound of any kind. No breeze and no scents.

Just darkness that flitted and shifted between the eerily-spaced tree trunks, the ground broken by nothing except for the pools that held something even darker still.

This was definitely, Tegan had decided, not Brisbane.

Home, the Doctor had said. Think of home. And she had.

Then she died.

She was certain of that. She had felt her skin tear and rip even as she felt spirit break apart and drift into nothingness, desperately trying to conjure up an image of her old house, her yard, her room in the TARDIS anything and…. And failing.

Then she was here, alone in a dark forest filled with trees of onyx and sliver that stretched up into nowhere. Lost. Alone.

But not afraid.

Tegan squatted by the nearest pool and stared into its depths, wondering. She looked for a rock to chuck in the middle, but there was nothing. The ground about her was smooth and featureless. She hugged her knees and rested her chin in the valley between them. She should be afraid, shouldn't she? Or does dying cure all fears…

It wasn't home. It was dark and lonely and strange. And yet oddly familiar. Like a story she'd heard from long ago.

Lions and tigers and… oh my.

The Doctor was there, across from her, on the other side of the pool. Tegan started and shouted with surprise.

But he couldn't hear her. He wasn't there. Not really. He was faint, hazy. A ghost. He couldn't see her, but he too was looking into the pool.

Tegan looked down again, into the impenetrable blackness. And saw a spark, bright, blinding, miniscule.

Déjà vu.

She'd seen this before. It was tiny, it was unimaginable. But nonetheless, it was the Universe being born.

"And so it expands, every outwards, never ceasing." It was the Doctor's voice, not in the air, but in her head. Tegan meant to answer him, but knew he couldn't hear.

A hand, ivory black, dipped into the pool and plucked out the ever-expanding globe. The figure, an alien, held the ball of fire before him, and stood on the edge of the pool between Tegan and the Doctor. They could both see him, even though they could not discern the other.

It was one of the same aliens that had abducted them, Tegan realized. The ones who had killed her.

The same, but different. Smoother. Older. Kinder.

It smiled at them both, in turn, but saved a wagging finger for the Doctor. It gestured down to the ground again. Where there had once been a lone pool, was now a basin, fed by a stream dark stream at one end and open to a larger one at the other.

The figure gently placed the glittering cluster of stars and novae back into the pool and Tegan saw the Doctor's face light up with understanding.

Tegan looked again. The Universe was still expanding, but not equally; faster in some areas than others. Carried by the current, drifting.

Tegan blinked. She never thought of space as anything other than nothingness. Static. A blank nothingness, painted by stars and planets. Not fluid, not a moving canvas that began to pull the colors apart.

The alien smiled again, an angular expression. Naughty, almost. It took their hands and leapt into the pool.

Tegan was pulled into its wake, and felt the Doctor brush past her as they slipped into the pool and left the forest behind.

Tegan had the strangest urge to hold her breath. She reached to plug her nose, but there was no need. She was submersed, afloat amid the stars and lights and clouds, as intangible as they were, both larger and smaller than they were at the same time. The Doctor was beside her, unaware, as they floated through the universe, as if swimming in an ocean full of incandescent algae, spreading outward, but also pulled by the current, by the tide toward something else, somewhere else.

It was only then that she saw the Nothing. It came from the above. It came from the sides. It came from below. It devoured worlds with a swift suffocating blackness. Brushed aside whole galaxies.

It was then that Tegan felt afraid.

The darkness wasn't in the pool. It was coming from outside the Universe. Something larger. Something incomprehensible. Uncaring. Oblivious.

It was going to destroy them all.

And not even notice.


	8. Don't Take it for Granite

The specimen looked like granite; milky and crystalline with an odd, greasy sheen to it, shot with cracked veins of white and purple. Quartz or possibly nephaline… it was difficult to tell.

Nyssa wasn't going to move closer to find out.

She held the scanner gingerly before her, squinting to read the mercurial display, trying to decipher the alien symbols shifting upon its surface. The unit was squashed and wrinkled, like a metal plant root. Occasionally a tendril leapt out to snipe at her fingers and she'd let out a yelp. Everything around her was strange. Nothing here was safe.

Nyssa shook her head and moved to the next specimen, shuddering as the rock behind her rumbled deeply at her departure. It wanted her. She knew that. It made her grateful for the Cyber-technology that maintained the force fields. Which was a peculiar feeling indeed.

The next specimen was smaller, although it still towered over her, with a large crystalline head and an angular, sweeping body. Its weapons and limbs had been wrenched off, leaving awkward stumps, scarred with savage cracks that ran deep into its body. Cyber-tentacles were bolted onto the surface of the specimen; others twisted and burrowed in through holes drilled into it by force-cutters. The force fields that restrained it did nothing to dampen the creature's howls of anguish and misery.

Nyssa stared at the scanner again, but couldn't focus her attention on it. At least they'd left her alone in here. There were no guards, no hideous, mutant Cyberman... no mutated Adric. She was... alone... Alone. Her whole body trembled again, quaking. Initially, when she'd first been brought here, the sheer scope, the sheer audacity of the research smothered any emotion other than fascination. Allowed her to forget… to forget…

She desperately wanted to forget.

But she didn't know how…

And now she was torturing innocent creatures… creatures that she couldn't even name…

"It's a Kroton."

The scanner flew across the room, clattering into the darkened recesses of the vast chamber as Nyssa jumped with surprise. "Doctor!"

The Doctor was bent over the side of the chamber, half-hidden in the shadows, examining controls that squirmed and melted beneath his fingers. "Only a SDS-level scout unit though… Hmmmm….I wonder… Don't worry, they can't detect me… but could you turn that off? It's giving me a headache."

"What? Oh." Nyssa reached deep into the pocket of her khaki overalls and flicked off the distress signal. It was one of the few items she'd managed to grab from her desk before… "I was afraid to use it; I was afraid it might be a trap..."

"Well, it would be, I suppose, if they hadn't already killed me." T he Doctor looked up at her with a quick glance. "They haven't tried to convert you."

Nyssa wasn't sure if it was a question or a statement. "No. At first I thought it was to lure you into a trap, or perhaps…" Perhaps Adric was still in there somewhere, trying to protect her. But she didn't say it. She knew it wasn't true, couldn't be true. "But they haven't converted anyone from the station who had been infected by the Lazar's disease."

"No… they wouldn't… alters the configuration of the neurons… not very compatible… Damaged goods, in most cases I'd imagine." The Doctor kept mumbling as he moved to the next specimen. " Goodness me! An Ogri."

"Doctor…" Nyssa paused, not sure how to say it, but knew that she had no choice. "Doctor, it's Adric. He's alive, but... They've converted him."

The Doctor turned from the Ogri to stare, his full attention focused on her.

"Or, at least I think, after conversion, he converted them." She hated to speak it but could think of no other possibility. Adric's knowledge of mathematics, coupled with what he'd learnt of the TARDIS and block-transfer computations, in the hands of the Cyber-host... she shivered. "They're time-active now, Doctor," she saw the creatures again in her mind, the silver twisting slugs that writhed and hissed. She'd seen them dive in and out of time and space on their scanners, wriggling through the vortex, infesting people and planets up and down along the length of their timeline. "They don't need bodies or ships any more; they can absorb any metal or organic matter, any creature…"

The Doctor nodded curtly, as if somehow, he had other matters on his mind. "I did notice some irregularities on my scans… among some other things I've seen recently. It would explain their temporal abilities. They never possessed the elitist attitude the Daleks maintained towards other species... a distinct, if horrific, advantage…" He returned his attention to the creatures. "And now, it would appear, they need your assistance with tribiophysics in converting- or rather, harvesting," he corrected, "silicon-based life-forms… fascinating. Have you made any progress?"

Nyssa glanced around the floor, searching for the discarded scanner. "Little… It's only a matter of time though, with or without me… When they brought me in, I saw thousands more laboratories like this one, all working on similar specimens…" Her voice drifted off… something else was bothering her, but she had refrained from asking. There could be a hundred different reasons why she wasn't here: she could have finally gone home, moved on or be safe inside the TARDIS. But Nyssa doubted it.

"Doctor, please, let's get out of here." She hated how her voice sounded in that moment, so pleading, so young, but she couldn't take much more. She felt old, weak. Worn.

"Yes, of course. Well, sort of. You see, I have a plan." He gave her a wink then and, for a moment, Nyssa felt her heart glow, as it used to, once so long ago now.

It gave her the courage to ask. "Doctor, where's Tegan?"

"She's dead." He said it so quickly, so sharply before diving back down to the alien panels again that Nyssa hoped she'd misheard him.

But, deep down, she knew it was true.

"I never said it was _my_ plan… Nyssa, I'm afraid I'm going to have to ask you to do something that you won't like…"


	9. Womb To Tomb

Shivering.

Shuddering.

The world was shaking.

No. i She /i was shaking.

Tegan lifted up her head. The cool, featureless forest floor stretched away before her, soaking into the blacknes around her.

She was back in the forest of pools… of darkness and reflection. Of worlds that birthed and died in stagnant puddles-

No. She remembered now. She'd been drifting, drifting in space, away through the cosmos, away from the Doctor, away from the Nothing.

She remembered remembering:

Of stumbling out of the warehouse by the river, the acrid stench of Dalek pus and offal running in the streets of London, steaming as the rain trickled down the sides of the buildings.

Of the endless stretches of time it took her to get back home, of sitting at the rear end of the aircraft, a Qantas blanket tucked under her chin as she numbly watched the world crawl past below her. Of surfing on couches and back rooms, cursing herself for not having a bank account, her passport or even the necklace her mother had left her that sat in her room on the TARDIS, so far away.

Of frustrating hours writing up a CV, trying to explain where she'd been for the last four years, of her failed career as an airline hostess. Of waiting tables, again. And again.

It had taken her six years to work her way up as sales manager. Six years of mindless, stupid, meaningless work. Exhausting, frustrating work. Eventually, she'd met Daniel, solid, reliable, huggable Daniel. And Tegan vowed to never be left stranded, to be left poor and homeless, ever, ever again.

And then the TARDIS had landed on her doorstep one evening, blue and eager, like a child, waiting for her to come out and play. She'd stepped inside, without a thought, without a breath, not caring of all the people, her friends, or even Daniel. She just let it drop away, let the past six years fall away from her and she let this stupid, insane world take her gratefully. Again. Third time's a charm.

And then she died...

She felt herself drift then, back in the void, after the blackness had come to claim her, come to blot out the moons and stars. Felt herself dissipate, dissolve, her thoughts stretched thin and tight, her memories crying out into the blackness, demanding to be remembered, to be heard, to be mourned. But she was gone, then, so far gone… it was over. And she didn't even really care anymore.

And she was gone.

Then an ache, a tugging, viscous wrench, familiar and angry and pouting-

And she was here.

Now, on the forest floor, the ground was solid beneath her fingers as it had not been before and the trees were sharper in their stead, their bark smooth, their limbs graceful and dendritic against the vacant sky.

Everything seemed more real suddenly.

Tegan had a flash of a tropical sun, of blood in her mouth, of salty waves and something familiar filling her, Rapa…- and then it too was gone.

She turned on her side. The alien was there, opposite her, where the Doctor had been once, in this place beyond time. It was staring at the pools again.

Something inside her kicked: she wasn't going to play, she wasn't going to look, it was foolish and childish and for the love of all that was holy, she was not going to look into that damn po-

Oh.

She could focus now. On everything. On a mountain range on a distant world. On a million different worlds; she could see them all. She could see galaxies and ants in a single glance. Zooming in and out in an instant to wherever she cast her eyes. Nothing was beyond her vision. The vertigo was indescribable. But she swallowed it down and concentrated.

She could see things… no, more than that, she could see through their eyes, experience what they felt, heard, smelt… It was too much. She jerked her head up and stared at the sky above her, dark and empty. She could handle empty.

In her quick glimpses, she'd been able to see the universe dying, obliterated, a swipe at a time. She'd seen Earth, its crusted husk encircling a bloated sun, plasma streaking out of gaping solar wounds. And slithering through the void, gleefully devouring the outer Jovian worlds, was a horrible snake of impossible size.

Her child. Her monster.

Tegan steeled herself then, her fists clenched and quaking, and gathered every bit of rage that burned inside her at the thing that had killed her, had ruined her world and her friends… and she made herself look again.

And this is what she saw:


	10. One more time, with feeling

Turlough knew things were bad. He didn't know they were cave-bad, though.

There was fire, fire everywhere. It licked up the sides of the cavern in intricate rills and twisting loops, fierce-red living ivy that sizzled along the fractures and seams in the rock, the orange and burgundy tongues lashing out at the deep shadows that clustered around the stalactites and towering crags.

The cave smoldered with stench of sulfur and smelt of the grave. Turlough had to blink constantly just to keep the soot out of his eyes and it was making it difficult to recite the chant properly. He wasn't sure his pronunciation mattered, not with the hundreds of them in the cavern, muttering over and over again words from worlds that were long since lost to the creatures of this universe, words that called upon life from the very dawn of time…

The robe itched horribly too.

At least there were no choreography for him to perform. He dreaded dancing. There was just endless chanting.

His knees were killing him. The floor was rough-hewn oolitic limestone, sand-paper rough and chafing against his damp skin.

God had saved him, yanked him out of the Observation TARDIS with a force field through an exterior portal and propelled him across galaxies, dodging out of the way as Gallifrey and the assembled fleet was swatted out of existence.

Turlough hadn't even had time to blink; it was over that quickly.

Drawn through space by an invisible force, watching the stars fly past him, Turlough hoped for a moment that God was taking him to the Worldsphere, the mythical home of the uber-sentient computer and the celestial object that housed a trillion People on a world that wrapped round a sun like a fist.

Instead, they'd looped, a parabolic curve, back towards the emptiness that was the Timelord home world, to a distant rock on a nearby solar system that had escaped the casual destruction.

And into this cave.

God had shown him the Worldshpere, in response to his questioning, projecting the image upon a flat force-holo screen in the back of the cave. The massive world was under bombardment, raked by silver talons that tore through space and burrowed into its surface. Gossamer slivers of metal rained down upon the world, twisting with malevolence, as the Cyberhorde descended upon the surface, the vicious metallic worms biting their way towards the juicy center. Where God lived. Where all the People lived.

"We've held them, until now," God had said. "But the crust is only so thick; even my shields cannot contain the entire Sphere…." The yellow globe/avatar had sounded tired as it spoke, bobbing sullenly before the screen.

Turlough knew that it was hopeless. Though the Cyberhorde was infesting the universe, a system at a time; but the Darkness swallowed whole quadrants in a gulp. The last stand before Gallifrey had been defiant. Cinematic. Daring. But futile.

And they'd all known it. But they'd stood together anyway, for lack of anything better to do.

They wouldn't just lie down and die.

Turlough would, if they'd let him, but he'd been shoved into a robe and forced to kneel, for hours now, chanting among these harpies, anxiously expecting the fire to drip down from the roof and incinerate him.

He'd give anything for a pillow and, perhaps, even one of those wretched dinners from the TARDIS food machine, or even, Trion help him, school…

Turlough caught himself nodding off, and raised his head at the dramatic change in the cavern. He stared at the dais that loomed above all of them, carved out of obsidian and quartz, glinting in the dancing firelight. Even as the chanting began to increase in complexity and volume, Turlough saw there was something forming in the air, hovering above the polished rock, stirring and twisting into creation.

His tongue was thick and dry in his mouth, and he fumbled over the alien consonants, his mutterings lost in the echoing crescendo of the Sisterhood. He gave up and bobbed his chin soundlessly, staring at the dais as the language of the HomeWorlders carved a hole in time and space, forcing into being their saviour, the only hope in the universe as was foretold by the Harmony of Karn.

The figure solidified before them, small, wrinkled and insignificant upon the grand igneous pedestal.

Turlough gaped.


	11. 1134209 flip it up, smack it down

1134209 1134209 1134209 1134209 1134209 1134209 1134209 1134209 1134209

He could find solace here, here was safe, here was blocked. He'd built the haven in an instant, a reflexive action when the first implants had pierced his neural cortex, flooding his neural pathways with corrective signals that re-structured, re-designed.

It had taken him a moment, then, a moment that almost cost him everything. But to be fair, at the time they were ripping out his ribcage and replacing the pale, soggy blades of ivory with alloy plates that glistened in the dark, bloody wetness of his chest cavity.

He'd built a wall out of numbers, a steady stream of calculations that deflected the blistering signals of the receivers, but he dared not venture here often.

He twitched to attention, out of the fugue, out of his refuge.

There was a flash in laboratory 2113312 in the heart of the sinusoidal station, the steel-blue hulk that now occupied a position in the center of the known universe. The silicate adsorbtion experiment series; one had succeeded. Information streamed into him. He tasted the data, savoring the algorithms and marveled at the audacity of the computations. It was Nyssa. No one else had such elegance with tribiophysics.

The new formulae and necessary modifications were instantaneously transmitted through out the gestalt. They altered their attack platforms, regrouping, redesigning, from the smallest chrono-annelida to the Command Carriers that were blasting Sontara from orbit. The crust of the Worldsphere, buckled and burst as the newly designed cyber-forms devoured the rock, assimilating it, re-birthing it into animated landforms that were entirely new and no less deadly. The shell began to eat itself. The Cyberfleet poured through, unleashing silver death into the soft, flesh-infested interior.

The host reveled in the new data and the various factions and child groups fought for domination within the group mind, yet he felt a gush of pleasure flow through the artificial glands in his body. The same feeling he'd known when he'd first corrected the data that they were pumping into him, changing, improving it. The way, over time, that he'd improved the entire race. Not seeking to dominate, but merely to correct errors and streamline redundant protocols. He'd tried resisting once, but that way led to… he couldn't … that way was blocked.

The experiment was a success; but now he had to deal with Nyssa.

1134209 1134209 1134209 1134209 1134209 1134209 1134209 1134209 1134209

The vast chamber of the research center was dark, lit only by the hazy green halo of the specimen chambers and the sharp, yellow light of the examination couches. The Cyber-Ogri battered at the force wall with its new silver limbs; it had grown a head of sorts, dripping with lichen composed of algae and electronic filaments and bristling with weaponry. The Kroton-hybrid was no less obscene, its crystalline body throbbing with organic fluids and writhing cables. But it was the Trakenite that stood out, her tiny silhouette dwarfed by the creatures she'd created.

She looked the same as he remembered. Slightly older, with more gray and the odd wrinkle, but still the same person he'd known so long ago. Time had passed differently for him. Much differently.

She faced him silently, her expression drawn and haggard in the alien light. She looked expectant.

He raised his arm, weaponry quivering…

… and paused.

1134-

Theyweren'twatchingnowhecouldaccesthesequencesreleasetheemergencyescapepodsdeleterecordsandrunawaywithNyssatheycouldescape

He held out his hand, but gaped with surprise: her arm had shimmered to silver and lanced into him, impaling its serrated end into his chest plate.

He blinked. His life blood and greasy oil spluttered onto the ground before him, rivulets streaking down Nyssa's arm and soaking into her blouse.

He was amazed. He was dying. An automatic failsafe triggered an alarm.

Another transmuted fist severed his neck. It wasn't a clean cut, but ragged and angled. His head dangled to one side, partially attached by residual wires and flapping flesh.

He let out a tortured howl, trying to cry her name but the pain was too great.

Adric died with a wet, rattling gasp at her feet. But his electronic eyes kept seeing. They watched her pull out her arm and shake off the dripping goo. Watched her form fade and flick, sparking into that of a silver man, smooth and gleaming. The figure paused, assessing the many guards that marched into the room, calmly. Then it leapt into life once more, hacking and slicing into the assembled forms, reducing the laboratory to nothing more than a slaughterhouse.

Processors in Adric's head, still sparking amid the wet and grey tissue that was rapidly cooling and congealing, twitched and relayed the observation to the host: assassin, kamelion-droid at large.


	12. Denial, acceptance

Nyssa could hardly bear to look.

She tried to remain calm.

Adric's head was jammed between the neon pink crystals of the Time Rotor. The clear casing had been removed and the crystals lunged toward the ceiling with each pulse, clawing at the air. His silver eyes had been ripped out, bleeding oil and mucus into the heart of the time vessel. The skin of his face, what was left of it, was pale, the shade of the flesh of a fish that had been left to rot, limp in the sterile light of the console room. Veins of silver shot his cheek and neck as if someone had pumped his arteries with mercury. Loose flaps of his eyelids fluttered over the empty sockets as the rotor sighed up and down.

Nyssa had stepped into the familiar blue police box ahead of the Doctor, anxious to escape the hideous laboratory, but something caused her to pause, to look behind her, to see the Doctor's hand brush the back of her neck. There was a spark, like static, and then the Doctor was gone, replaced by her reflection that stood in the laboratory she had just left. Inches away; a world away. Nyssa was still in that strange moment of limbo that existed between the wooden exterior of the TARDIS, replete with flaking paint and stained with the grime of a thousand different worlds, and the crisp, chirpy interior of the console room. Something in the back of her head yelled at her then, screamed at her; the doors were closing, closing around her, threatening to trap her forever in this space between worlds. She thought she heard a voice in that instant, a flash on the edge of sound. It sounded a bit like Tegan, but it must have been her imagination. Instinct threw her backwards, cart wheeling into the Console Room.

And there it was. The sight that still filled her with horror and loathing.

It wore her father's face, but a younger one than any point that she had ever seen him wear in her life. Everything about him was the same, barring the demeanor. And the eyes.

"That wasn't the Doctor; who was it?" She asked the creature that had slaughtered her father and wore his body like a cheap suit.

The voice was slick and calming. Gentle. Deliberate. "A former companion of mine," the Master replied, flicking away at the switches." The doppelganger creature had returned shortly, bearing Adric's severed stump in its silver paws. The rest of the body still mimicked her, but the hands had gelled to metal, as if not wanting to soil her pink hands with the bloodied cyber head. It bowed its head as it handed the skull to its master before it leapt back into the station again, accompanied by the sound of blaster fire and cyber-screams. "Kamelion was wasted with the Doctor. Might as well give a hamster an assault rifle." She made herself look into those hateful eyes. "I know you won't believe me, but the Doctor sent me to rescue you."

Nyssa didn't believe him, but asked anyway. "Where is he?"

The Master glanced away from her then, a gesture very uncharacteristic for the heartless thing she knew him as. It was just a slight lowering of the head, that seemed to convey sadness, regret. It was a gesture Nyssa's father had used.

It shook her to the core.

"The Doctor won't be coming back. Ever."


	13. Ready, Set, Go

Tegan dived into the pool.

She understood now.

She was running, running through the cosmos, each foot pushing off a sun, a moon, a gas giant, sprinting through empty space, the solar winds pulling at her hair, her legs tireless, fleeting.

She had seen. Seen moments from always. Taken from forever. Lost for all but her eyes, her mind.

She'd seen the aliens, just like the one at the pools, do so many things throughout space and time. Black and obsidian. Slick like glass. Cold like rock.

A snap shot again, as she flung herself around a black hole, and broke away in an arcing curve, running faster than ever, of an alien on the bridge of the freighter, plucking Adric away at the last fatal moment before it slammed into ancient Earth and handing him over to the Cybermen, primitive, hulking, awkward.

Another snap shot: the aliens pressing her down, ripping out the Mara, her skin dripping off the scaly hide, the huge jaws devouring Earth with carnal, lusting thrusts.

But she knew now. They weren't aliens. They were totems. Left behind by the Homeworlders before they left, before they went away. Left scattered across the Universe, waiting for the moment, waiting for the Darkness. Waiting for the inevitable.

The stars were flashing past now, becoming streams of light as she sped through the emptiness, running, faster and faster, through space, faster and faster until she was flying through time, back into the depths of the Primeval, the images still dancing around her.

Of the Cybermen blossoming into the Horde with Adric's intellect, claiming Terminus, making it their own, nesting in the heart of Creation. Of Nyssa, enabling them to spread through rock itself, into cores, into suns, into everything that could be. Of Kamelion, slashing through the station, sending out the alarms, the distress beacon, bringing the Horde hurtling towards the time/space point.

Of the Mara, sniffing the cosmic dust, her nostrils thrilling with the scent of the power, the energy, the perverse cyber lifeforce, laced with the spice of the Master's TARDIS. Of the massive snake howling, throwing herself towards Terminus.

It was a matter of timing, she had to get it right. Only one shot, one try. So much was depending on her, so much; she'd been given a second chance, she couldn't waste it, not now.

For she knew, even as she felt the centuries fall about her shoulders, even as she rushed through eternity, she knew she'd died, died when the Mara burst out of her head.

Or perhaps she'd been dying for a long time before that, but hadn't wanted to admit it.

The TARDIS telepathic circuits had saved her mind, for a while, kept her in the oblivion that lay between the shell of the ship, caught between realities. But she'd dissipated again, her thoughts drifting into nothing. The alien had saved her then, the totem, left by the pools. The totem. And the Doctor who followed it to her.

He'd done it, once he realized what was happening. Joined with the TARDIS and dematerialized, rematerializing inside the telepathic circuits, around her, Tegan Jovanka, of all people. Solidifying around her, leaving her gasping on the edge of the pool, substantial and whole once more. The shell of the ship was her skin as she plummeted down, down into the depths, deep past the suns flaring into life for the first time and deeper still.

He was with her now, trapped with her, inside her, guiding the TARDIS, coaxing her deeper, faster.

Tegan had harbored the Ship once, long ago, in her belly, in her womb; now the ship harbored her, protecting against the scathing heat of a trillion suns and the blasting radiation of the fierce pulsars that burned her eyes. She was the TARDIS who was the Doctor who was Tegan. They three were one.

There. It was ahead, she could see it now, blazing in the distance, when it was young, when it was new.

She'd seen in before, withered and old, deadly and desperate for death. Hovering in space, pleading to follow it's builders.

It was older than legend, older than myth. It was a door way, it was a portal, sentient, lonely, wanting. It was Torus.

But here, in the beginnings, a region banned by all the laws of Time, Torus was open, brilliant, stunning.

They needed her, the Doctor and the TARDIS. For they trusted her. Her of all people. The Torus was swelling now as she neared, as she sprinted the last stretch.

This Universe, her home was lost, ruined, beyond saving.

There was only one way.

To save the Universe, they had to die. They had to kill themselves to save everything. But they couldn't do it alone. They needed her to help them. Assisted suicide

For the Doctor could never hurt his ship any more than it could hurt him. They needed her to do what they could not.

Tegan bent her head down and raced toward it.


	14. Aesop's slop

Funny things, time wars.

Where do they begin?

A tortoise crosses the finish line, his dusty skin gray in the sunlight, his shell warm and scented with exertion, the hare panting and desperately late, far behind.

Which is all fine and good.

Until the time wars come to town, Cyber-style.

Then how does the story end?

Does a cyber-enhanced, silver-furred trans-temporal hare flash ahead of the tortoise, soaring across the finish line, his long, twitching cyber-enhanced ears perky in the sunlight, triumphant?

Or, once harvested himself, does the tortoise go back through time and set a trap for the hare: a hole deep and wide, covered with leaves that will break under the soft, furred foot.

Round and round, over and over again. Silver meets flesh, takes bone, swims through the timelines, punching holes, gouging out new realities, any reality, any reality it takes to win.

Does the race begin at the finish line? Does it end at the start?

And you thought it was confusing before:

A police box that was not a police box, a TARDIS that was not the Doctor's TARDIS, hung in space, slowly orbiting station that was once Terminus. Silver worms, slimy and sentient, wiggled their way across the blue, oblong box, searching for a way in, their tiny serrated teeth probing the hull for a weakness.

Inside the vessel, Nyssa stared at the scanner screen. Around her, the Master's TARDIS had dimmed, quietly, subtly growing darker. The cheerful, white interior that had tricked her into thinking it was her old home was gone, shifting down into a faded gray. Even the console itself seemed shadowed, as if attempting to coordinate with the Master's eternal wardrobe of black on black.

She didn't trust him. But, as she took in the data that flooded the scanner readouts, she realized it didn't matter if she didn't trust him. It didn't matter what she believed.

Because everything else was just so impossible, nothing seemed to matter any more. Good, evil, life death. They seemed so tiny; so silly.

And what the Master was trying to do- what she was helping him do – was even more impossible. He was on the other side of the console, intent upon preparing his TARDIS for the event. The pink band on his wrist was completely out of place on his black velvet sheathed arm. She wore one on her own arm, unsure of its design. She knew only that it held her in this moment, kept her from the cyber-corruption from affecting her from an earlier timeline. He had only the two, apparently a gift from someone he was unwilling to acknowledge. She presumed that meant it was the Doctor, but she couldn't be sure. The Master wasn't exactly being particularly chatty of late.

She'd seen the Mara pounce on the station, slipping out from the dark void in a single, terrible motion, wrapping around Terminus with her tremendous coils, her jaws gobbling up the docked silver vessels and ripping out great jagged chunks of the station, dusting space with puffs of debris and twitching bits of Cybermen. The Mara flared her cobra-esque hood, with something akin to glee, then rammed into the station, head first, her body swelling even larger, if that were possible, as she burrowed deeper in a gluttonous rampage.

But the Horde grew larger, still responding to Kamelion's signal, clustering around the exposed tail of the Mara like a swarm of gnats… from everywhere they came, and alighted on her skin, layering an ever-shifting silver mass, accreting thicker and thicker.

Nyssa stared in disbelief at the readings, a slow dread filling her, as she began to realize what she'd help to create. The Horde wasn't just Cybermen anymore, not just the harvested bio-population of the Universe from all across time. They'd incorporated, with her help, not just silicon-base life forms but all inorganic matter, the very planets themselves. They'd harvested moons and worlds and suns. From all across the universe and all throughout time. All matter in the universe was coming to Terminus, converging on the station, converging on the Mara.

The great snake reared up once more, her giant head smashing out of the station to stare at the creatures that dared to soil her skin. She attempted to shake them off, as one might snap a towel, but the creatures remained crusted to her hide, a seething veneer of silver. She howled again and began to feed on them, on everything around her, devouring them all. But still they came, from every region of space, time warping around her. And still she fed, growing larger and larger as the universe around her dimmed, as the stars worlds pressed closer about her.

The mass readings of the Mara were taxing the TARDIS's ability to process the data. And still the Horde kept coming.

Nyssa frowned the image on the screen seemed to bleed and shift. "What's happening?"

The Master glanced up, his fingers tapping furiously on the keyboard. "They've changed their attack, time shifting…" his muttering trailed off for a moment. "The TARDIS will try to track the progression in a linear path; we need to wait for just the right moment."

Nyssa watched as the TARDIS scanner compensated, attempting to provide a coherent narrative.

The Mara pounced on the station, slipping out from the dark void in a single, terrible motion, wrapping around the station, only to find the Horde was there, waiting, swarming around her, drilling into her, pummeling her from every angle of the time spectrum.

Still the Mara fought eating in a frenzy, leaving nothing behind but saliva and excrement, silver black and vile.

At some point, Nyssa knew not when, the Horde managed to penetrate the Mara's hide; it began to convert her, her green skin was blistering from silver from the inside out and the snake howled a terrible scream that Nyssa knew she could not possibly hear.

But something was wrong.

The silver infusion seemed to slow, then reverse. The Mara tossed her head back and then bent to feed again, the meal was a feast now as nearly all the matter in the Universe was laid before her.

"It's not working!" Nyssa pecked anxiously at the controls, willing the readings to change.

The Master brushed her aside and took control of the panel, trying new codes, new programs.

Nyssa stared at the screen again, her voice muted with awe. "They're not just machines; they're composed of organic matter, of living matter of all kinds… The Mara feeds off of fear…" She grew cold, thinking of what Adric may have thought in those last few moments, if this meant that they could still feel something, however small, even if it was just instinct, after conversion. She turned back to the Master. "They still fear her, deep down, at their very core. She's going to win."


	15. Don't make a sound

The chanting stopped.

Karn shook.

The tremors jarred the cave, sending soot and droplets of flame sparking onto the floor of the cavern and the assembled Sisterhood and alien refugees

Turlough didn't need to look at God's scanner fields to work out what was happening, he'd been told they were coming: the Cyber-horde had found them, were slicing up the crust above them. He looked up into the roof, peering into the shadows and crenulations of the dark rock. He thought he could see something squirming, glinting evilly in the flickering firelight, but he couldn't be sure

The figure on the dais gasped, drawing his eyes once more to her.

She was tiny, clothed in an overly large t-shirt, her long hair trailing down to brush the floor. She was only four feet tall, with wide eyes that stared around her in alarm, her mouth opened in a silent scream, as if terrified to make a sound since that would make this real, would make them real, the aliens and fire and earthquakes would be real and they would get her, they would get her.

At last she squeaked out a cry, tiny and petrified. It echoed around the cavern, magnifying in volume, amplifying her fear.

Her feet were bare, pink and soft against the cold slab of stone. But Turlough knew the eyes, would know them anywhere, anywhen.

The rock seemed to glow underneath her touch. It was imperceptible at first, but the light seemed to bleed from beneath her skin, green and trickling, it seeped into the heart of the black rock, growing faster and brighter. First a leak, then a spring, then a waterfall.

If it had been pink light, instead of green it would have resembled a much-scaled up version of the TARDIS time rotor's heart.

Information, Turlough realized, information was being sucked out of the girl, filling the rock with coordinates and temporal specs.

He took a step forward, irrationally, wanting her to see him, wondering if this girl would somehow recognize him. For reasons he couldn't explain he wanted this Tegan, plucked from her timestream as a young girl, to recognize him, to glare at him with the oh-so familiar distrust look that he was so accustomed to.

But the roof opened up then, and the Cyberhorde rained down upon them in a hail of silver and blood.


	16. Almost Home

If nothing could make a sound as it obliterated space and time it would be: swhooop.

Swhooop

as it sliced through the cosmos across multidimensional panes…

Swhooop

As life and matter was swatted aside….

Swhooop

This close to the end the life and matter was mostly stained silver…

Swhooop

And what wasn't, would be soon, in the peculiar way that time infestation/propagation has…

Swhooop

Deep time itself wasn't safe, any more than the rocks at the bottom of a lake are safe from a dredge pulled across the bottom.

Swhooop

It was getting closer, this invisible slaughter from a universe much larger than ours; getting closer as if distance had any meaning. The nothing could be as large in scale as a person, our universe a cell or an atom to it.

Swhooop

It had no agenda. None that we could understand. It brought only death. Death was coming soon.

Swhooop

Coming to the Mara. Soon.

Swhooop

Coming to the Cyber-hode. Soon.

Swhooop

Coming for us all.

As Tegan raced towards the gateway of Torus, she imagined she could feel its breath about her shoulders and she ran faster still.

The Doctor, his mind the only part of him left that lay deep within the heart of Tegan/TARDIS, send his thoughts ahead of her, and spoke to Torus, explaining what they needed, where they needed to go, what they were doing and about the Homeworlders. Torus assented, and dilated, the Nexus, its azure heart, was open and welcoming.

She was almost there, almost to freedom, almost to a new home.

Swhooop

Tegan dodged out of the way, dodging something invisible and deadly that sliced through the time-space between her and Torus, sending her wheeling and spinning out of control. She slammed into the Nexus sideways, screaming with frustration, crying with rage- it wasn't time yet it wasn't going to work, this couldn't work…

Tegan felt the pull dragging her through the Torus, into a new reality, into a new universe, but she wasn't ready, it wasn't time. She fought the tide, clawing through space, raking at the stars, trying to drag herself back, caught halfway between to Universes.

She cried out for the Doctor, out of instinct, out of habit.

But he was dead. All that was left was trapped with her, just as frustrated, just as helpless.

She cried anyway.

And was stunned when she heard her own voice answer.


	17. Wake up

Turlough was huddled under God, the force fields an invisible umbrella, that the silvery worms bounced off of comically, snarling and spitting as they searched for an opening.

The force fields didn't keep out sounds; didn't keep out the screams.

The cavern popped and splattered with flesh and rock as the infestation burst into their new hosts.

Little Tegan was screaming too, huddled on the platform, high above them all.

The silver worms turned from their attack and, as one entity, turned their attention to her, a little girl upon a rock that glowed an eerie green color.

Little Tegan, helpless in her father's t-shirt, the drool from her sleep still wet upon her chin, looked back at the silver demons.

And howled.

The silver swarm raced toward her.


	18. Smear Factor

Nyssa paused, her finger resting on the lever that would activate the program.

She really didn't want to do this.

She didn't want to be here.

She didn't want it to end like this.

But she couldn't imagine living in her own world any more.

In space outside, the Mara had grown immense, to impossible dimensions. What Cyber-matter she did not consume was amassed around her or drilling into her, their numbers overriding their individual fear, for now.

But it wasn't going to be enough.

She pressed the button and the TARDIS shuddered around her. "Shields are down," she informed the Master. "The hull is permeable now."

And in that moment, the Mara saw them, saw inside the tiny box to the power that lay within. And she leapt.

"Now!" The Master shouted as he activated the console, the rotor grinding up and down, Adric's head gyrating with the motion as the ship partially dematerialized. And rematerialized around the Mara.

Nyssa threw herself back against the wall as the shimmering green scales ripped through the console room and in an instant, smeared the Trakenite against the wall into a bloody, pulped stain.

But Nyssa's program was still running.

The Mara roared with delight. She was so much more now, as she groaned and shifted with the new dimensions and assimilated the last of the cyber-matter into her new TARDIS body. Her body was everything now: organic, cyborg, mineral and TARDIS. She could see everything now.

And at the far edge of space, in the deepest well of time, she saw a light, the only light left anywhere. She could taste its power, even from here.

She licked her lips with a forked tongue the size of galaxies and raced toward Torus, gravity and light bending around her tremendous bulk.


	19. Blue Mourning

Tegan heard the scream of her younger self and latched on to it, pulling herself towards it, flying out of the center of Torus like a cork.

She smashed her way into the cavern, crushing the Cyber-horde that stood in her way. She bent down and snatched the child up, cradling herself in the crook of her arm. She raised her other hand and forged it into the shape of a sword and in a single great sweep, thrust it deep into the glowing rock.

She felt the information flow up her arm from the lodestone and into her processors. She could almost feel the Doctor's mind delight in the numbers and permutations. When she withdrew her hand, the child was gone. She looked around the cavern, but there was only death and blood and silver creatures that hammered and gnawed at her outer plasmic shell. She shook them off and leapt back up into the sky, leaving the dead world of Karn behind her.

The data transmuted into a map within her mind. She could see all the lodestones scattered all throughout time and space, set there by Homeworlders so long ago, that held one fragile moment, a moment pure from cyberdeath and the Mara and the great sweeping nothing, held in place and taught by the lodestones, like a plastic tarpaulin, stretched tight and painfully thin. One plane in the crystal of time and space that was still the world she knew.

She could do this. They could do this. It was going to work.

The way to Torus was easier now. Space had shrunk and time had shriveled, devoured by the Mara and the nothing. Nothing stood in her way this time. And her excitement, she laughed at the thought, so close was she to home.

But the Mara was there by Torus, waiting for her, stupidly huge and very, very angry.

There was no sound in space, as it has already been said. But they were both part-TARDIS now and could speak without sound, without mouths, although they moved them anyway, out of habit.

"How many times do I have to kill you?" The Mara hissed, her head tilted, curious.

Tegan didn't have time for this. Something told her that the Mara knew that there was nothing else left, nothing left to eat, to kill, or to fear her. Which made Tegan feel strangely sad, in an odd, pitying kind of way. But she was in no mood for this. Instead, she grabbed the thick neck with improbable fingers and tried to hurl the monster out of the way. But the Mara was just as strong as she was, if not stronger, and could materialize and dematerialize anywhere, any when, just as easily as she could.

"And where are you going in such a hurry?" The Mara hissed.

Tegan realized that the Mara hadn't devoured Torus yet, had kept it to trap her and knew not its purpose. Yet.

Tegan felt a cold prickle against her skin, her hull skittering with block-transfer goose pimples.

The nothing was close. It was coming again.

This was it. Now or never.

It was too moronic to work but Tegan tried it anyway. She stared over the great serpentine head and said, "Look behind you."

Tegan wasn't sure if the Mara could sense the nothing too, or if she was just paranoid, couldn't help herself. She looked. And Tegan leapt.

Tegan felt a giant snapping as the jaws snapped at the empty space behind her, but it was too late. She was in the Nexus. And then Tegan made the TARDIS do what she needed it to do and she felt her skin grow and stretch.

The hull of the TARDIS could be as small as a gnat or large as a pyramid. Or as large as a moon. Or as large as anything that mathematics could model.

The TARDIS stretched itself across the entire universe, lodestone to lodestone, encompassing the single plane of time that the Homeworlders had preserved, as if it were dipped in amber. The time frame with no cyber race, with a dead adric, an imprisoned Mara and a terrified little Tegan who woke up from a strange dream in her bed at the age of eight. The TARDIS scooped it all up and vomited it all out through Torus into another, empty universe, one far removed from the Nothing and the Mara and the Cyber-horde.

But the TARDIS wasn't built to do that. It hung in the Nexus, in the heart of Torus, wounded and dying. But it wasn't going to be fast enough, Tegan knew that. The Mara had seen what Tegan had done, glimpsed the fresh and tasty new universe on the other side of the gateway, and she slithered towards the opening.

And Tegan did what she had to do. What the Doctor could not. Self-destruct.

The TARDIS exploded in a fiery blaze of light, obliterating Torus and the gateway. Sealing the way out.

Trapping the Mara in the dead and empty Universe. Alone.

In her rage, the Mara spat quaking gobs of saliva that jiggled and shook before collapsing against her hide, the gravitational pull of her body attracting everything around her, everything left in the universe.

And she sensed the nothing coming toward her.

She reared up and pounced.


	20. Snake Bite Black

There would be legends of the battle between the nothing and the Mara, if there were people to tell, or people to care.

No one can say who won or how long the fight lasted, if at all. Perhaps the Mara was gone in an instant or if its new body could take on something outside our universe, outside our knowledge.

Or perhaps, the mass and energy of the Mara was enough to sate the nothing, or distract it, to keep it away from our Universe, our new Universe, our new home.

Perhaps the Homeworlders know the outcome, know if the nothing will come for us where we hide now. But they are gone, hiding themselves in a new reality, leaving us to our own devices this time, should the nothing come for us once more.

Time will tell. And in the meantime there will be new legends, new stories. More heroes.

But this legend is forgotten, as it never happened, and everything is as it was in this new Universe that everything has found itself in, safe and sound.


	21. Bookends

It was raining again.

It was late afternoon, but the thick cloudy sky made it seem much later. Rain drops pebbled up the dining room window, smearing the view of the front lawn. The distant clattering echo of the rain upon the roof filled the house with a gentle, soothing roar. Tegan clutched her mug of orange pekoe tea and stared at the world outside.

She was supposed to go to work today, but she'd called in sick. She'd lain in bed for hours, listless, huddled under the sheets, doing nothing but staring up at the ceiling and listening to the sound of the rain.

She was supposed to go out to dinner with Daniel tonight. She hadn't bothered to call and tell him she wouldn't be coming.

She couldn't shake this fugue that seemed to pull at her from somewhere deep inside. She stared out at the window, but her eyes were drawn to her partial reflection, cast against the glass by the growing darkness of the sky outside. She looked shorter somehow. She'd shrunk over the past few years. She wasn't sure how. It didn't seem fair. She was never tall in the first place. Fortunately, the table hid her hips from her view; they were a work in progress lately… in sort of a 'gone on strike' kind of way…

She lost her train of thought.

She couldn't even find the energy to get depressed about the state of her thighs…

Not a good sign.

She hadn't been able to face work today; didn't know if she could face it tomorrow, to be honest. After all, what was the point? It didn't matter. None of it mattered.

She hadn't even gotten dressed. Couldn't be bothered. She still wore the boxers and t-shirt she slept in. She'd stained the shirt with strawberry jam from her toast around noon, but didn't see the point in bothering to change.

The one thing Tegan had held on to after all these years was her stubborn belief that… well, just stubbornness, actually. But it was gone now. There was no anger, there was no righteous bitchiness, there was…

She was tired. So tired. So lost.

She'd done so much when she'd traveled with the Doctor. Or at least seen so much. Everything else since she left that warehouse seemed so empty, so meaningless. No matter how hard she worked, it just seemed to inconsequential. At one point, during this long morning, she'd thought about forming a support group for ex-time travelers, left stranded and dazed in a world full of stupidity and pop culture.

Tegan wasn't a big fan of deep thoughts, but she'd been having a lot of them lately. And the dreams.

Or the memory of a dream.

Of when she was younger, dreaming of waking up in caves full of monsters and fire and…

But it was gone, the images slipped away every time she tried to focus, to remember.

Tegan shook her head slightly and swatted at her bangs that dipped into her face. She didn't like herself like this. She wasn't this sort of person. She was a doing kind of person, not a moping kind of person.

But try as she might, she couldn't think of anything to actually do that would help. Or make a difference.

So she closed her eyes and listened to the sound of the rain, the steam from her tea tickling her nostrils.

She thought she heard a sound then, an achingly familiar sound. She couldn't be sure, but it felt as if it were coming from outside, out back, behind the house, in the garden. She flew to the back door, the sound of the coffee mug clattering to the floor echoed in the hall behind her as she ran, as she lunged for the door handle and wrenched open the door to see

Nothing. There was rain. There was the flagstone patio and an array of desolate, puddled flower pots, the withered remains of stems and twigs standing lonely in the muddy water, but no TARDIS, no blue box. Just the rain.

Tegan stood in the doorway, completely leveled, the icy rain peppering her face in quick, sharp bites and realized that she was crying.

Weeping.

And it really, really annoyed her.

She clutched at that. Embraced it.

She was weeping. Gushing like a child, waiting for daddy to come home and make everything all right.

She stopped crying and got angry.

So she couldn't travel through time. So she couldn't do or see wondrous things or even tell anyone about them. But she damn well wasn't going to sit around waiting for a man, or close enough, to come back, if he ever was.

Tegan turned her head up into the cold rain and felt the droplets dash away her warm tears, felt the iciness soak into her hair.

This was her life. It was all that she had. And she was doing the best she could do. And someday, she would die. And that was that.

In that moment she accepted what she'd done and that there was only so much she was going to be able to do. The realization startled her; just as the wind nipped at her skin, so did the thoughts chill her heart: she'd been living the last few years of her life hoping that someone would take her away from it all, or, worse still, end it.

And it was time to finally let go and accept that whatever time she had left was hers.

Goodbye Doctor. She'd said it once, long ago, and she thought it again now as she looked up into the sky. She shivered as a sudden chill took her. Tegan shook her head in irritation, realizing she had to get out of her damp clothes and do the laundry. With a sigh, she turned away from the dismal weather and walked back into the house, pulling the door closed behind her.

Long ago, in a Universe far, far away.


End file.
